Ain’t no party like a North Korean party cuz a North Korean party is MANDATORY.
I’ve heard other versions of this joke (substituting Russia or Liz Lemon for ‘North Korea’), but this is the basics. I can’t remember when or where I first heard it, but it’s been years, and it still gets me.
Oh, it still gets me.
Cambridge, MA – Harvard University’s men’s basketball team is the 25th-ranked basketball team in the country, leading observers to assume it’s some kind of sociology study. Harvard’s basketball team is 14-2, with one loss coming against #9 ranked UConn. “Jesus, we were only up two on Harvard at the half,” said UConn coach Jim Calhoun. “Grant money must be just pouring into that basketball team.”
Harvard denies that its men’s basketball team is engaged in anything besides competitive athletics, but observers point to evidence to the contrary. After Harvard lost to Fordham on January 3rd, each Harvard player engaged their Fordham counterpart in a fifteen minute interview on perceived biases. “Maybe it’s a cultural competency thing,” suggested Dick Vitale. “Their grad departments do some wacky stuff.” And the team’s new motto, “Publish or Perish,” is also raising suspicions. But not all observers think Harvard’s new-found athletic prowess points to an ulterior academic motive.
“Harvard’s been moving in this direction for years,” said ESPN’s college basketball analyst Andy Katz. “Everybody knows Harvard undergrad is nothing but grade inflation and TA-led classes. Those kids have more time for basketball than anybody.”
Filed under fake news
I saw a bumper sticker today that said:
Keep Louisville Weird
support local businesses
I wonder if they sport bumper stickers in Houston, Texas that say:
Keep Houston Corporate
support multinational corporations
Probably not. I’m guessing oil executives aren’t an ironic bunch.
Filed under short
Wilmington, DE – With President Obama declaring the war in Iraq officially over, Americans breathed a sign of relief that they soon would no longer be able to find Iraq on a map again. “I clearly remember the day in January 2002 when I learned Iraq was a country,” said Norman Griswald, a Wilmington accountant. He and other Americans reflected on the brutal realities of nine years spent knowing about a place outside their immediate lives. “Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani. Al-Falluja. The Ba’ath Party,” Griswald added somberly. “Jesus, I still know what I’m talking about.” Medical experts say the loss of worldly ignorance Americans suffered during the Iraq War might take days or even weeks to recover from, but given time Americans might again know only that Iraq is one of ten countries with four letters in its name.
Filed under fake news, our day and age
Papelbon celebrating another 30-minute 1-2-3 inning
Jonathan Papelbon will be the Phillies’s closer for the next four years. Concerns about the size and length of the contract aside, Papelbon’s arrival brings a larger cost to the City of Philadelphia.
Jonathan Papelbon takes 45 minutes between each pitch.
So that’s an exaggeration, but it is a peer-reviewed non-exaggeration to say that he takes an infuriatingly long time between pitches.
So I did some math to answer this question: How much of our time will Papelbon waste over the next 4 years? I addressed this question by using the Fangraphs’s ‘pace’ statistic which tracks time per pitch.
*The Rules of Baseball (cue angelic choir) give a pitcher 12 seconds to pitch after receiving the ball from the catcher. If every pitcher used 12 seconds, that would mean that Carlos Ruiz takes 11 seconds to get the ball back to Madson, and 8 seconds to get the ball back to Cliff Lee. Obviously, umpires are not enforcing this rule.
From Dave Cameron at USS Mariner, a succinct account of why the Mariners have been terrible since 2004:
November 7th, 2003 – The Seattle Mariners hired Bill Bavasi as General Manager.
January 8th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners traded Carlos Guillen for Ramon Santiago.
November 15th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners signed Richie Sexson to a 4 year, $50 million contract.
December 22nd, 2005 – The Seattle Mariners signed Jarrod Washburn to a 4 year, $37 million contract.
June 30th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Asdrubal Cabrera for Eduardo Perez.
July 26th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Shin-Soo Choo for Ben Broussard.
December 7th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez.
December 18th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Chris Snelling and Emiliano Fruto forJose Vidro.
December 20th, 2007 – The Seattle Mariners signed Carlos Silva to a four year, $48 million contract.
February 8th, 2008 – The Seattle Mariners traded Adam Jones, George Sherrill, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, and Kam Mickolio for Erik Bedard.
Filed under baseball
I haven’t played much Mario in my life, but apparently he sometimes wears a raccoon dog* fur as one of his power-ups.
*I didn’t know there was such a thing as a ‘raccoon dog.’ Apparently there is.
Anyhow, PETA objects because, you know, corrupting video games like Mario teach kids that wearing fur is acceptable. Mostly because that fur gives you magical powers in your quest to save the Princess.*
*I can’t wait for the first 60 Minutes exposé on 9-year old Jaden who skinned the family dog and wore its fur so he could jump to the top of the fridge and get his Halloween candy.
So apparently the anti-fur activism is going so well that PETA is now focusing on niche segments of the fur-loving world, like people who confuse Super Mario Brothers and real life. There are so many things hilariously wrong with this campaign that we could be here all day.
But we’re here to talk about one very special thing. THIS:
Filed under marketing, our day and age
I recently read a NYTimes article recounting Herman Cain’s recent mystifying comments about Obama’s handling of Libya. The following part caught my eye:
J. D. Gordon, Mr. Cain’s spokesman and national security adviser, said the candidate had not been at his sharpest in Milwaukee because of a lack of sleep amid a long day of traveling.
“We were all going on four hours sleep, so he was tired,” Mr. Gordon said in a telephone interview. “When he got the Libya question, it took him a while to get his bearings on it, but he got the answer right.”
The Yankees should sign Mr. Gordon as a pitcher, for how much desperate spin he can generate. But that aside, I find this refreshing. The reality television show that is the GOP Presidential Nominee race may actually be lurching our nation, in a roundabout fashion, towards a more reasonable expectation of our national political figures.
From what I can tell, Cain and Rick Perry have committed so many mystifying public gaffes and startling changes of direction that they are starting to own them. Rather than apologize, they dismiss their behavior as inconsequential to their qualifications for the Presidency. This tactic is parroted by their campaigns and their media cheerleaders.
This forces their critics to hone in on what we should be talking about, which is the merits of their ideas and other ways to measure qualifications. In races past, a candidate’s ability to be consistent seemed to matter as much, or more, than his underlying qualifications to do the job. In races past, candidates were usually too afraid to admit they had ever been wrong about anything. In order to be President, you had to be a granite pillar of immutably correct opinions. As Stephen Colbert put it, George W. Bush believed on Wednesday what he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday.
Cain and Perry are blowing these benchmarks out of the water. The harder conservatives rub their eyes and try to see someone besides Mitt Romney as a viable president, the farther they go to absolve clowns like Perry and Cain of their gaffes and reversals. Which in turn drops both gaffe-making, and previously advocating for positions now deemed to be incorrect (known outside the Beltway as “admitting your mistakes”), down the list of hazardous materials to a candidacy. What rises up the list may be (oh god please may it be) the merits of one’s ideas.
Filed under news, our day and age
